The Battle of Corrin - Entry #1

Already at page 83 of The Battle of Corrin before the new year starts!!  The book starts off a little slow, continuing from The Machine Crusade but I know it will be picking up.  Since I have read all the books before, I know what will be coming.  However, I did not have this perspective when I first read The Battle of Corrin and it does make me look at things more closely.

For example, on page 34 I found this statement so much more critical than ever before: "Humankind could not fulfill its potential without her." (The Battle of Corrin, p. 34).  This quote was referring to Norma Cenva and you need to read the Dune books all the way to the end to know how profound this statement is.

The word "mentat" first appears in The Battle of Corrin and was created by Erasmus as "a term of endearment" (The Battle of Corrin, p. 54) for Gilbertus Albans.  An interesting point about that ... a robot created a new word that stuck in the human vocabulary.  Hmmmm.

And finally, for this blog entry, something that really has nothing to do with Dune.  I just loved this quote from Omnius: "We will have empirical evidence soon enough." (The Battle of Corrin, p. 57) I just don't recall ever having seen the word "empirical" used so perfectly in a work of fiction before.  Actually, I can't recall ever having seen the word in a work of fiction I have read before!  Every year there is an instance in the labs I teach for me to explain empirical evidence to my students.  I tell them that "empirical" is a $20 vocabulary word and that they will impress their instuctors if they use it correctly in lab reports.  In this case, Omnius was referring to the prediction that even though the infectious virus delivered by the thinking machines had only a 43% mortality rate, the human societies would collapse simply due to the unpredictability of humankind.